title: BONUS: Inside "Chez Vous"
author: The Truth
contenttype: podcast
publication: The Truth
published: 2026-01-22T01:00:00+00:00
sourceurl: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/mgln.ai/e/495/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/SBP5747687657.mp3?updated=1769041772
word_count: 4495
This is the truth, I'm Jonathan Mitchell, and this is a special bonus episode. We're going to talk to writer Lewis Cornfeld about the story he wrote that we just released called Sheavu. I noticed that some people are talking about this story online and wondering what's going on. It's a crazy story. And so I thought that in an interview with the writer might be helpful and be interesting to you guys. So I'm going to talk with Lewis Cornfeld right after the break. And if you haven't heard the story Sheavu yet, this episode will be full of spoilers. So you'll definitely want to go and listen to Sheavu first. This is an interview that's meant to be heard after you've heard the story. Before we get to that, the truth is an independent production. And to try something new, we've been offering it an ad-free feed. This is the show without any ads, without any interruptions, just one continuous experience. You wouldn't even get a message like this. And I am so excited about this that I wrote a little song about it. So here, take a listen. This is a little song I wrote about subscribing to the ad-free feed. The truth podcast.supportingcast.fm That's how to help make this show survive. The truth podcast.supportingcast.fm If you've been listening to this show lately, you know that last month was my wife's birthday. And I surprised her with a gift. You got me my cashmere hoodie sweater from quince. Quince.com, who also happens to be sponsoring this episode of the truth. I love this sweater. I've actually worn it twice this week. It is so soft, it is a very flattering fit, so I can wear it with jeans, I can wear it with sweats, it looks cute no matter what. They've got wardrobe staples with quality that's made to last. And they work directly with safe, ethical factories, and they cut out the middlemen, so you're not paying for brand markup, just high quality clothing. Mother's Day's coming up. Do you think they sell flowers on quince? I don't think they sell flowers on quince, but they definitely have jewelry on quince. They have purses on quince. They have accessories. Professor Wardrobe with quince. Go to quince.com slash truth for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too, that's q-i-n-c-e.com slash truth. To get free shipping and 365 day returns, quince.com slash truth. Today we're talking about the making of our story, Shavu, and I'm going to be talking with Lewis Cornfeld, the writer of the story. And like a lot of truth stories, this started with a completely different concept of what it was going to be. I wanted to make an episode that was going to be several very, very short stories, sort of a single episode anthology. We've done this a little bit before. We did an episode called Wonder World USA that I took place in an amusement park. And so it'd be sort of like that, but we wanted to find a place like an amusement park where all these short stories could take place. And so we came up with the idea of a restaurant, and eventually we abandoned the idea of doing it as an anthology and decided to do it as a single story. But before we got to that point, Lewis had come up with this interesting concept for a restaurant. What if it was a restaurant or people are being fed themselves to themselves and everybody loves it? This is writer Lewis Cornfeld. When I pitched it at the meeting, sort of as a joke, expecting that everybody would shoot it down. And I love the idea. And you liked it. Yeah. So what made you think of this idea? I have no idea. I was showering, and I just suddenly had an image. It was like a mental image of like a Salvador Dolly painting or something of just a restaurant full of people all just eating themselves at the table. And having a grand, had grand old time. And so we were thinking of this as an episode where like four different writers each took a different angle on this concept. And we talked about a bunch of different ideas, and we sort of explored that. And I think it was the next week or the week after I came back, and I said, you know, guys, I don't think we can afford to spend so much time on a single episode. And so I asked you to just take the story on yourself. And so where did you take it from there? Well, I started with the original suggestion that it was a sort of little like miniature anthology of stories all in the same location. So I started drafting an outline that told three or four different stories that were all overlapping simultaneously. There was a story of like this tech entrepreneur who had blown all this money on a failed app and was kind of desperately trying to get alone from, you know, this like plutocrat or something. And there was a story about a married couple who had saved all this money in order to treat themselves to this meal for their 40th anniversary. And there was a story about two waiters who, you know, have lives outside the restaurant and kind of dealing with their thing. And then there was the story about Cassandra and her very expensive meal. So I spent a few weeks working on that. And pretty early on, it was clear that that wasn't working and, you know, with every draft, the Cassandra story seemed to be the one that people were most responsive to. And then eventually, you know, you had the wise decision to just cut all the rest of the stories and just focus on the one, which was the right call and a big relief. Yeah. I think the characters that you were working with, I thought that Cassandra one was the most relatable. And so where did that come from for you? Well, I mean, the original pitch of it came from Mary. We were kind of talking in the meeting about different things that could happen in the restaurant. So I suggested, you know, someone freaking out about being in a split the bill situation. This is Mary McDonald who writes a lot of stories for the show, but who also plays the lead character in this story. Yes. So I thought that that was great and I started fleshing that out. And yeah, I mean, I've definitely, I'm a freelance writer and an occasional freelance actor and a teacher of improvisation and I like what I do, but, you know, the rest of the world kind of doesn't think much of you. And I don't have to face that too often because I run with crowds of people who are, you know, in that same world. But then every now and again, when I get dinner with a friend who has a real job, you suddenly feel extremely less than and unaccomplished and unimportant. And then especially when, you know, you have to kind of keep up with, with them buying the kind of meal that I wouldn't normally buy, you know, that you really feel like the kind of backwards country cousin a little bit. So I wasn't hard to tap into Cassandra's psychology for the story of Cassandra is definitely my own psychology as filtered through the voice of Mary. Have you ever written product reviews? No, but my wife does and I stole a lot of her ideas from that. I actually would just ask her if like, what would you say if you were writing this review and she gave me, she gave me the voices to use? So she actually does that. I didn't know that. She does. Yeah, she has to be responsible for multiple editorial voices. And so you focus on this relationship between Cassandra and Missy, this writer and her very wealthy friends. And I think it's interesting that you chose to focus on that rather than the fact that these people are literally eating themselves. The thing about the idea that sort of struck me and the thing that you responded to when I pictured it was not that they're eating themselves, but that they love it. So it's not like that's a problem that needs to be solved or someone wakes up in a reality where this is happening and they're trying to like get people to come to their senses. It seemed like the premise of the situation was this idea that this is just completely normal to people. Nobody questions this because it's so accepted. When you have like a nightmare sometimes and like the most horrific thing in the nightmare is just sort of not emphasize somehow or just treat it as like strangely normal. Like you don't even, in the dream, you never question how weird it is that this thing is happening. To me, that was the tone I wanted to hit with it, that it's sort of a funny story that takes place in a horror world. But more like a nightmare world than like a horror film world. But the main character has it completely inverted. She thinks that she's in a horror story, but for the wrong reason. For her, the horror is she can't pay for this meal, not that she is cutting off her own appendages. What does that express that she doesn't see that as a horror? I'm part of it. I think it expresses a little bit of groupthink. You have a tendency to get kind of like a lulled into kind of accepting certain values or value adjacent, I guess. But you kind of accept as normal what the people around you accept as normal. That's one thing. I also think it's a little bit of the joke of status and social standing are still such potent motivators of your behavior that they can actually feel like acutely painful if you're in danger of having the wrong status or not fitting in with a group to the point where that fear and that anxiety would outweigh physical harm. Not in real life, physical harm, I'm sure it would outweigh it. The idea here is that the kind of like narcissism of this runs so deep that it's not even registered anymore physically as a threat to yourself. The idea of not having great standing with people feels like much more of a threat, which I think is also, you know, I'm a little bit of like a let-ite and I'm a little bit of evolving into kind of a grassy old man culturally and it is sort of reflective of how I feel about online culture in general that all the stuff that I was told as a kid you should be better than has become like the currency now of how you exist online. It's just this constant thing of like making sure that you appear the right way and making sure that you say the right things and do the right things and have the most followers and all that kind of stuff. So that's the kind of psychology of where she's at. That's the scarier thing to her. Why do you think it was important that Missy is genuinely kind rather than oblivious or cruel? Because I wanted the pressure to come from Cassandra that you know she's feeling this pressure that she's being evaluated as less than by these people and so she has to kind of maintain this fiction to herself that she is not feeling as broken or empty as she's feeling. But I think it's a different story. If that's a legitimate pressure that's coming from their judgment, if they're not judging her that way at all, if the fact that she can't pay her bill is not a problem to them and they just don't care. If it's all coming from her and the way that she's evaluating their evaluations, that to me felt more realistic. You know if it's the other one then the story just becomes like a really simple kind of binary us versus them. The story is a kind of call to action against treating each other this way or whatever it is. And that's not really what the story is. The story is not taking a side against these rich people. They're fine. It's not really taking a side against anybody. It's just sort of looking at the way that this particular anxiety, this particular kind of self-evaluation, Cassandra makes just sort of spirals out of control to the point where she becomes completely blind to the context of this like horror restaurant. You know? I think that's, to me, more interesting, I'm not really interested in making a comment about, you know, society's problems. I'm not smart enough to make a valid comment about that. But I do think that there is sort of a mental space where you sort of make bad evaluations of yourself that, you know, leads you down some unpleasant paths. I think there's a way to read this story that is from the perspective that this is all in Cassandra's head and it's like literalizing anxiety she has. You know, she's going to have to give up a part of her body in order to fit in. Yeah. A part of herself. Yeah. I love that. It's a really valid way to interpret the story. Yeah. Were you ever worried that the extremity of the premise might overshadow the emotional stakes of that relationship? No, not really. I was much more worried about the possibility of just kind of offending some of the audience with a little bit of like the gross out sound effects because to me, it was, I know, you know, sensitivity when it comes to sound, especially like chewing sounds. I know that's a very legitimate thing for a lot of people because I know people are really sensitive about that. I really laid off the chewing sounds for this. I think that it's done well and tastefully. Yeah. There's just like one moment. Yeah. You want to suggest it more than anything else and I was conscious about not wanting to push people away with that, but at the same time, that feeling, it's not supposed to have shock value, but it is supposed to generate a certain kind of anxiety that should be kind of permeating. Yeah. There's something about hearing those gross sounds that kind of establishes the stakes of the situation the characters are in. Yeah. But I love how the characters react to it and I'm very matter of fact, deadpan kind of way. Yeah. I have to give compliments to it. It's an amazing deadpan cast. They really, everybody on this cast is like so, so good at underplaying. And we're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, we're going to talk with Lewis about the production of the story and how we work with actors. It's not as simple as just reading the line of dialogue in a believable way. That's on our return. If you want to hear our show, add free. Go to the truthpodcast.supportingcast.fm. And we're back with Lewis Cornfeld, the writer of the story, Shay Vu. And for this story and for all of our stories, I like to have all the actors together. And in fact, we recorded this one at my apartment and all of the actors were around a table. And they were all interacting. And I think having them all in the same room made a huge difference. I've done a lot of recording, I've done voices on some other shows where you never meet the other actor that you're with and you just sort of take it line by line. And then the direction will be extremely granular and it'll be on like how you're intoning like a single word or adding a pause or something. And it's very frustrating and would not work in a story like this at all, where you really need people to play off each other and you need that sense of like rhythm and familiarity and that kind of freedom, not really to improvise, not to add live, but that freedom to just kind of like let it breathe to let each moment have a little give to it, a little room. And it's very well casted during and we got very lucky that the actors just on like meeting each other for the first time hit it off. And even before we kind of got into the script, they were already spontaneously developing a flow and making each other laugh. And so when you see that, it's like 80% of the work is already done. You just need to kind of keep them on task until like hitting a line occasionally the way that you want it to be hit. But the rest of it is like just let that spirit kind of take hold and let them just sort of play off each other and talk to each other. So that happened pretty quickly in this recording. Yeah. And one of the big advantages to having everyone in the same room together and interacting is that they have the opportunity to listen to each other. You know, they're not just reading lines off a script and saying what they have when they're supposed to say it. It's that they're listening to another character and they're reacting to what they hear. And there's an inner psychology that goes into that communication that's a back and forth in a response. And so a big part of acting is actually listening. People who don't make this stuff don't realize how hard it is to actually kind of translate a line of dialogue on the page into like a believable compelling bit of behavior. It's not as simple as just reading the line of dialogue in a believable way. You actually have to kind of feel your way into the space around that line of dialogue. Like you have to be able to kind of sort of show us the thought that led to that line, you know. And that's a hard thing. But it's particularly hard in audio because you can't see the thought in the person's eyes. So as an actor, you have to be able to kind of include that sort of negative space around the line too. And you have to include the presence of like the feeling and the thought that are actually making this person say this right now. It's very, very hard to do that. And it's really easy, even for very good actors, to get like very stiff when a mic is put in front of their face, you know, they focus more on saying the words correctly than they do on like everything that's around those words. And so whenever you get a note, like just kind of like breathe, listen, hear what the other person just said, throw this line, you know, out a little bit, don't worry too much about it. It relaxes them and it sounds more spontaneous, but I certainly also don't want to. It's not like you recorded the whole thing in one brilliant, perfect take. There were lots of brilliant, wonderful takes. And then the editing just kind of sharpened it and made it added that finesse and that smoothness, you know. Yeah. And I think that the pacing is a really big part of it too. That's something that comes through the editing because every single line of dialogue, usually it comes from a different take. I mean, it's very unusual for two lines of dialogue to have come from the same take. I mean, it happens, but it's unusual. And so pacing becomes a big part of the editing process. And it's a big part of how we read each character's psychology, you know, how long it takes for them to respond. Yeah. That's a real big. Again, like half the job in audio fiction is to indicate what people are thinking and feeling without having to spell it out, you know, you want to conjure that. You want the audience to actually be able to like see this person's thoughts in their own mind. They feel their way into it. And pacing I think is like the key to that. Yeah. And you put a lot of pacing notes in your script. Yeah. I'm big on that. And especially in the first scene with Cassandra where she's talking at the bar, you know, you put specific beats in the script so that we know how long she's, she's pausing. I tend to write my dialogue out in a way where you can kind of get a sense of the rhythm just like visually. You know, I sort of break up lines in a way to kind of indicate to the actors sort of when they should breathe and when they should keep on keep on talking, when it's a continuation of a thought, when they're interrupting themselves with a new thought, when they're trailing off. I think it's important that that kind of shows on the page. And so getting back a little bit to the meaning of this story, to the meat of it, this premise is really interesting and it's provocative and it's compelling. And I'm wondering what the metaphor of a restaurant where people eat themselves says about the world for you. That, you know, culturally, we're sort of in the ascendant phase of a kind of like self-obsessed, extremely myopic state of consciousness and there is something that I find kind of a little gross about everything these days and I don't know, I like, it's my own thing, but sometimes I kind of think about like, you know, the world is described by modern science as this kind of, we live in this sort of like weird hologram, you know, that's built out of quantum indeterminancy and the government has publicly announced that, you know, UFOs are a real phenomena that we're investigating and it's pretty amazing. And nobody seems to give a crap about any of it. It's just like taking pictures of yourself and getting angry about petty moronic things. It's a people are distracted by their own reflection. Very much so yeah, it's very, it's very, the story of narcissists, it's very just like self-obsession every which way and so yeah, it leaves me feeling a little bit uncomfortable and a little bit grossed out and I think that's where the image probably came from. And I like that the way that the story turned out sticks pretty well to what I think was your original intent for the story. Yeah, I think so. I think that like first image that came to me in the shower is still in the story if you're listening to it. I think it kind of permeates the whole feel of the place. It's kind of a nightmare that's not rubbing your nose and it being a nightmare and it's a comedy that's not rubbing your nose and it being a comedy. It sort of plays it straight as just like a regular story but I think both of those elements because they're not rubbing your nose and the way they play against each other or kind of clash with each other hopefully brings up a little bit of the sort of like comical uneasiness that I think the original image has. And that's my favorite kind of true story I think is stories that mix that really kind of emotional vulnerability with like a dark darkly comedic twist or some kind of insane shift in perspective on the world. I relate to that combination because I think that's how I feel in the world. Yeah, you know, I'm in agreement with that and I think that stories are kind of like inherently magical. It's a world that's being kind of created out of your imagination and there's something kind of amazing about that. And you want to capitalize on that by sort of invoking a person's imagination in the story. So you know, there's got to be some element of kind of spectacle to it or some element of show off enus to it where you're kind of using the medium in a way that's sort of seducing the audience. You know, on the other hand, there has to be something emotionally true or else wireless into the story. I'm not a big believer in just sort of like escapism pure and simple, I got at a hard time with that. Yeah, yeah, I like escapism as something to subvert, you know, like the emotions of the story subvert the escapist aspects of it. I think a really good story, you know, the reason, I don't know why we come to stories exactly. I think about it. It's sort of strange how important stories are to us, but like we need stories, we live and breathe stories that are everywhere for us. And they do have this kind of ability to give scale to your feelings in a way or kind of take your inner life and sort of like, I don't know, project your inner life in this sort of different shape or this different landscape so that it's like familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It kind of defamiliarizes this familiar thing or familiarizes this unfamiliar thing in such a way where I think it gives a little proportion to how you feel. But if it's not like about you in some sense, it just doesn't kind of pass muster for me, I guess. There has to be something in it that kind of touches you on the inside. And we will have a brand new story for you next week. It's called Dark Speed and was written by Hunter Nelson and it's about a struggling writer who has taken over a very successful sci-fi book series written by her deceased mother who learns that the story may not be fiction after all. That's coming next Thursday, January 29th. And please let us know if you like hearing these interviews with the writers in between stories. If you like them, we'll do more of them. And as always, if you'd like to listen to our show, Add Free. Out of the truth podcast.supportingcast.fm. Thanks a lot, Lewis. My pleasure, thank you and I'm glad our listeners are listening and supporting the show. I'm Jonathan Mitchell and you have been hearing. The Truth.